Program Director/Principal Investigator (Last, First, Middle): T o t O , R o b e r t D . PROJECT SUMMARY (See instmctions): The CTSA has had a major impact on the clinical and translational research (CTR) environment at UT Southwestern. Many new and highly successful programs in education and training, pilot grant awards, biomedical informatics (BMI), biostatistics, population research, community health sciences, and patient- centered outcomes research have been established. Concurrently, the CTSA stimulated UT Southwestern to invest heavily in CTR infrastructure by recruiting new clinical and translational researchers into leadership positions of major clinical departments, by creating a new research institute that focuses on stem cell biology and cancer and by greatly enhancing genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, bioinformatics, and systems biology. Two new, state-of-the art hospitals are under construction, to open in fall 2014, and they incorporate design elements that will support CTR. Our vision is to accelerate translation of new discoveries into clinical practice (T0-T4) by leveraging our scientific strengths. We will integrate and centralize our resources to work in an encouraging and collaborative research environment. Our three Specific Aims are to: 1) Enhance our Research Environment to Accelerate Translation of Discovery into Practice. We formed the Center for Translational Medicine (Center), directed by the CTSA PI, to serve as the new integrated home for our CTSA. The Center will coordinate and expand the clinical research enterprise while it educates clinical and translational researchers at every level. 2) Leverage Existinq and New Resources to Build on Four Innovative Programs in Translation including: a) Target Identification and Validation; b) Discovery in Humans; c) Intervention in Humans and d) Population Science and Community Engagement. 3) Share Knowledge and Discoverv. and Contribute to the Leadership of the National Consortium. We will share gains that are made in our programs in educational and translational research programs with the Texas Regional CTSA consortium and National CTSA Consortium. We will contribute to leadership in areas of translation including T0-T4 research, and discovery and commercialization of new drugs and devices. Our vision for accelerating CTR is well aligned with the new NCATS initiatives and takes full advantage of gains made in the previous funding. We will establish new and improved programs that will enable investigators to discover, translate and disseminate new knowledge that will improve the prevention, detection, diagnosis, and effective treatment of disease. RELEVANCE (See instructions): Improving the health of our nation requires a concerted effort by medical scientists, health care providers and public health policymakers. This grant application will provide the crucial infrastructure necessary for medical scientists to discover and apply new diagnostics and therapeutics for the detection, prevention, detection, diagnosis and effective treatment of disease. The goal is to accelerate the movement of these new discoveries into clinical practice to improve our nation's health in a safe and effective manner.